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Jimmy Kimmel pulled indefinitely by ABC for Charlie Kirk comments.
Late night talk show hosts have waned from their glorious Letterman days, but boomers still care about then enough that they're still a scalp worth scraping off the skull. It's hard to think of a prominent figure on the right that would be equal in stature - Gina Carano? Piers Morgan? Roseanne Barr? nothing like him - if only for the fact that the entertainment industry is so aligned to the left. Indeed, even during the height of the progressive cancel culture era, it was liberal icons like Louis CK and JK Rowling that felt the heat.
If such a big figure can fall, who will be next?
With Colbert going off the air, and with the upcoming FCC hearings on Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and Steam, one can only anticipate the prizes that are coming. Destiny and Hasan are obvious trophies that the right would love to claim, but I have no doubt that the powerjanitors of Reddit are quaking in their boots. How many leftist/liberal commentators have made snarky comments on social media, as of late? This is the reddest of the red meat, dripping with blood, raw. The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.
Once again, I'm seeing the center left Ryan Grim types run with "Jimmy Kimmel was fired for a joke! What, is comedy illegal now?"
I have to ask, what was the joke? What was the setup? What was the punchline? If this were a rant Tim Dillon were delivering, and the context is we are laughing at what a sociopath Tim Dillon is, and that he's saying shit no human being could possibly believe with a straight face, ok. Has that become Jimmy Kimmel's act? Was the joke that he's so retarded and Trump Deranged that this is funny?
Falling back on "It's just a joke" is the bully behavior of people who abuse you. When you get upset at being punched, called a faggot, and having you D&D books stolen, they go "It's just a joke, lighten up". "It's just a joke" is always the last defense of the bully when the bill finally comes due.
It’s so weird seeing the left switch back to defending free speech and offensiveness in comedy and the right now justifying firings over microaggressions.
I guess I got too used to the brief span of time between 2008-2024 and should just expect this kind of reversal in things I assumed were stable to happen several more times across my lifetime.
This was not a microaggression, it was a full-scale insult. I'm not sure what a microaggression towards a MAGA person would be, "Nice Hat", maybe?
Yeah but that’s the same sort of thing someone from 2019 who was pro cancellation would have said about the cancelled party
You're right and this is all a cope. It's ridiculous. "Full-scale insult...from some sassy comedian. Suddenly that right-wing thick skin dissolves.
This equivocation is maddening.
Jimmy Kimmel basically did the equivalent of going on live TV the day after 9/11 and said “Bush did 9/11 and if you think otherwise you are a fucking retard.” and very predictably got shitcanned for it.
This is nowhere near the cancel culture of 2014 - 2022 where leftists were digging up ten year old tweets of jokes in semi poor taste, private conversations or video of teenagers singing along to rap in their car in high school and getting people expelled or fired.
How on earth can you justify this belief?
ABC yanked Bill Maher's show for saying that the 9/11 attackers weren't cowardly.
I looked that it up at one point and its not so straight forward. IIRC, he stayed on the air the rest of the year and just wasn't renewed, and ABC claims that the non-renewal was due to ratings, not what he said. Bill Maher claims that he was canceled for what he says, but he would have an incentive to spin it that way, it looks better for him to be canceled for being edgy than for having low ratings.
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Yep! I remember clearly.
That was rather unwise to say even if it was true. I remember being annoyed by that but not particularly surprised.
What Jimmy Kimmel did was actually much, much worse; dancing on the grave of a recently murdered victim of political assassination and simultaneously spreading an easily disprovable conspiracy theory for obvious partisan reasons immediately after a very tragic event.
Which is why the “Bush did 9/11 also all those firefighters that voted republicans deserved to die” on 9/12 is rather apt comparison, no?
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What I’ve observed over the past 7-8 days has been general insanity everywhere, with people on both sides failing to have any awareness of their own insanity as they use unreliable information or malevolent lies to judge those crazed loons on the other side. This (Kimmel situation, all the over the top responses and false equivalencies) is just another example. Woke left or “woke right”, it looks all the same to me. (European, no US political affiliation, interested observer from afar.)
I'm not sure what unreliable information and malevolent lies the right has embraced- AFAIK the original narrative 'far left shooter, upset about Charlie's stance on trans' was close enough to government work.
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I think this is also a false equivalence: the two sides so-called “cancel culture” aren’t equivalent either.
They actually mirror the limited / unlimited dichotomy between conservatives & progressives basically perfectly.
During the woke left reign of terror of 2014 - 2022 it was an increasingly intense and long list of things that you had to positively affirm or at least not contradict in order to (maybe, possibly) avoid being canceled. It changed day by day, hour by hour, year by year, and grew longer and more complex. Like multiple dials constantly being adjusted.**
In the “woke right reign of terror” that is now being feverishly being dreamed up by people who imagine the current situation is analogous, it’s a bright line to not be crossed; it’s very simple, obvious and easy to know what not to do in order to not incur the wrath of the “woke right” At this current moment.
Step One: Don’t ghoulishly dance on the grave of a recently murdered conservative activist and icon and state that he deserved to be murdered.
Step two: There’s no step two. That’s it.
The “woke right” aren’t demanding performative mourning from people who clearly hate them. They don’t wish to compel speech out of anyone. All these people had to do was not justify out loud the cold blooded murder of their colleagues.
But they simply can’t help themselves.
** An observation is that conservatives view violence / force as a switch and progressives see it as a dial also maps nicely onto this.
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